Today I attended the wedding of one of my former youth from the church where I previously served. It was a momentous occasion in her life and the lives of her family (both old and new). Though not to the same proportion, it was momentous for me as well. You see, marriage is bigger than we modern-day Westerners perceive it to be. It is bigger in the sense that it is weightier – that it means more – than we give it credit for and as a spectator of that holy ordinance today I was reminded of an attribute of God that is never quite appreciated as it should be.
God is love.
(1 John 4:8)
God is indeed love. Now, you may hear from time to time this phrase being quoted either from a pulpit, page, lectern or lyric. If you are one who keeps attune an ear to the stream of current thought and media, then you have certainly witnessed evidence of the gentle, loving, soft, and patty-cake nature of God as revealed by the skewed slur of the vox populi. This post-modern generation of people-pleasing voices airing the foggy conclusions of their nebulous thinking presents a flaccid and puny image of our great and mighty King.
A problem arises from this portrayal of our Lord. It is not that God is proclaimed as existing in the form and state of love itself. On the contrary, to hear that glorious declaration is a beautiful and praiseworthy thing. None-the-less a problem does exist and it resides in the hearing and even more so in the understanding that is transmitted through the conduit of that great word. When sacred scripture shouts, “God is love!” it is speaking to us through the language of a culture whose concept of love is vastly different from our own.
Love, spoken from the lips of an unregenerate, unchurched people speaks of a love that is self-centered. Wordly love, as it is adequately termed, charges its followers to live for themselves. Godly love, in contrast, earnestly pleads with us to die for someone else.
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
- John 15:13
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.
- 1 John 3:16
